Arrogant Ignorance

Let me explain one thing before I get on to arrogant ignorance.

In my day job, I work in electronic sales. Part of this job is to check over returns and make sure that everything that they are sold with is with them when they come back. If it ain’t all there, we ain’t taking it back. Concurrent with that, we ask them why they’re returning the item to see if we can fix the problem without a return.

Okay.

So I had a customer today returning a Sony Blu-Ray player. This is damned near a top-of the line player – Sony invented the technology. So I ask her why she’s returning the product. She explained that she bought the Blu-Ray of “Horton Hears a Who” with Jim Carrey and Steve Carell. If you haven’t seen it, by the way, watch it. It’s a fabulous film. When she put it in her player, it said that she needed an update to her Blu-Ray player in order to watch the film. She got pissed that we would sell a product in November that would stop working in December without some kind of update. I tried to explain to her that the update was relatively easy to get (either through Ethernet connection on the back of the unit or by downloading the update to disc and installing it to your Blu-Ray), and that ALL Blu-Ray players will require periodic updates as they figure out ways to make it better. At this point she started insisting… a little PROUDLY, I think… that she knows absolutely NOTHING about computers.

Before I get on to arrogant ignorance, let me fill you guys in on some facts about Blu-Ray, just so’s you know…

1) Within the next couple of years, Blu-Ray DVD’s will be all that you can buy or rent. Blu-Ray will supplant DVD just as DVD supplanted VHS and VHS supplanted just watching TV.

2) All of your current DVD’s will play BEAUTIFULLY on a Blu-Ray player. This is one advantage that the DVD to Blu-Ray transition has over the VHS to DVD transition.

3) Although they’re expensive now, around $200 to $300 for a player and around $30 for a new movie, the prices will drop to about half that over the next few years, from all indications. The players were introduced on a large-scale to the commercial market less than a year ago, and have already dropped to about 1/3 of their original price. In five years, we’ll be wondering what all the fuss was about.

4) If you like games, buy a PS3. They’re typically about $200 more than a Blu-Ray player, but will play Blu-Ray movies as well as PS3 games, and stream media from your PC and all sorts of other fun stuff.

Any more questions about Blu-Ray, attach them as a comment and I’ll try to address them.

Anyway, I think that this customer kind of typified modern Americans. We are ignorant and arrogant, and DAMNED PROUD OF IT!

I am forcibly reminded of years ago when that Martian meteor fragment came to earth bearing bacteria. When scientists went to Congress for funding because this could give us amazing insight into our own genesis, some representative (I think that it was that paleontological marvel Strom Thurmond) said “The Bible provides me enough of an explanation for where we came from for me.” In other words, he was trying to block this potentially earth-shattering revelation about science and investigation into it because of ARROGANT IGNORANCE!

As a Christian, I have a question for people like this… why did God give us brains? I can’t help but think that when things like this happens, God put his mighty head in his celestial hands and mutters “Oy vey!” (He was Jewish long before he was Christian, remember.)

Anyone who steadfastly refuses to learn anything about computers is going to get left behind. With the upcoming transition from analog to digital, the amount of things possible via computer is going to explode in ways that we’ve never seen before. Domino’s pizza is already launching a plan where, when you see a Domino’s commercial on TV, you can use your cable box to go to Domino’s website, insert a credit card into your cable box and order a pizza! And that’s just a very small tip of a very LARGE iceberg. In the seventies, when “new math” was introduced, my math-savvy dad felt helpless to help me with my homework. It’s going to be that times a million when it comes to communicating with your kids. In other words

IT’S A VERY BIG DEAL!

Computers have gone from something that you play games on and look at porn with to a viable part of our everyday lives, and it’s just going to get better and more prevalent.

And it’s not just computers. It scares me the number of school boards who insist that the non-science of creationism be taught in science class along with the SCIENCE of evolution.

So guys, do yourselves, your kids and everyone else a favor. USE YOUR GOD-GIVEN BRAIN for something other than keeping your ears apart!

Peace.

Randal